On most office floors, a call, a discussion at someone's desk and a person trying to finish a document happen within a few metres of each other. All of it is real work. The problem is that each one asks something different from the same room.

Speech is the hardest sound to ignore. The brain keeps decoding words whether the listener wants it to or not, so the person sitting two desks from a half-heard call is not fighting noise. They are fighting the words.

A brief usually describes a space by its type. But it helps to ask what will happen inside it:

• How many people will be talking in this zone, and how loudly?
• How close are they to the ones who need to focus?
• Does anything said there need to stay in the room?

Answer those, and the reverberation target and the material choices follow. A floor of financial analysts and an inside sales team can look identical in plan and need very different treatment. At Unidus Acoustics, we ask to be brought in while the design is still on paper. It lets us build products for the zone rather than fit standard panels around a finished ceiling. For over 40 years, we have made them in our own facilities, in wood, metal, fabric and acoustic boards, across offices and institutions including AIIMS, Air India, TCS and SBI to name a few. Retrofits work too, and we do plenty of them, though they make a space manageable rather than right.

Done early, the result is a floor where mutiple people can be on calls, and it stays workable, where nobody reaches for headphones to think, and where two colleagues can talk without interrupting the person beside them.

Put the acoustic requirement in the brief, next to headcount and power loads. Asked then, it shapes the design. Asked later, it competes with one.